Are Friend to Friend Payments Coming To Facebook?

Do you need to quickly send your friend a little money but aren’t sure how you are going to do it? If your friends or family need money fast and you aren’t close by a bank it can be hard to decide how to get the money to them in a way that is both safe and easy, as well as cheap. Pretty soon all you might need is access to Facebook and, more specifically, the Facebook Messenger app to send money to your friends and family.

Facebook Messenger Hacked
According to Stanford computer science student, Andrew Aude, Facebook Messenger is already setup to send and receive payments and all Facebook must do is turn the feature on. Using an iOS app exploration developer tool Aude discovered the both the code and the interface elements already in the app itself. With all the coding being done, it seems all Facebook must do is finalize their end of the software and turn it on and we will soon be able to send and receive money without ever having to leave Facebook.

Facebook Prepares for Payments
David Marcus, the former president of PayPal, was recently poached by the social media giant to head up its Messenger app product. With the addition of Marcus, it is not surprising that this new feature would make it into the Messenger app. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg stated at Facebook’s Q2 earnings call, “over time there will be some overlap between [Messenger] and payments.” At the same time he urged Wall Street not to get too excited as there was still much work to be done before this happened. However, Facebook may be closer than we first thought.

With the addition of payments to the Messenger app, Facebook is positioning itself to compete against other payment giants such as PayPal and, very soon, Apple Pay. There is no definite word as of yet if Facebook will charge a per transaction fee for this service and, if so, how much these fees will actually be. In the beginning, industry insiders are speculating the service will first be activated in the U.S. and will only be available as a person to person transfer. Down the road, Facebook is expected to expand their reach to other countries and even open up the payment service for group transfers.

What Messenger Will Be the Most Popular?
The ability to send and receive payments right from Facebook messenger will also give Facebook access to an even greater database of debit cards. The social media leader will then be able to leverage this database as they continue to work on the ability of making purchases right from your News Feed.

Currently, there is a global battle being waged as many major players fight for dominance in the messaging battle. With players such as Facebook, Apple’s iMessage, Google Hangouts and Kik just to name a few, the battle is shaping up to be fierce as competition increases and each services works to differentiate itself from one another. If Facebook does follow through with the payment feature, it could represent a large shift in messaging popularity as you will easily be able to handle payments as well as other rich message features from only one messenger service.